Tuesday, April 15, 2014

The Boneyard

I often dream about houses I've never lived in and going on adventures into their recesses. This is based upon a dream I had about a place where we played outside the house. We called it The Boneyard and it had white skeletal sculptures in it. Not sure what made them but they reminded me of Eldar wraithbone monuments in Warhammer 40,000. So here's an attempt to make it into a story. After I worked on this a bit yesterday, I had a dream about a lost Pink Floyd album which told the story of amorphous blobby people. Not sure if that will be something of it's own or I will work it into this later.

"No fair!" Jacky stuck her lip out. "You're dead. You can't do that."

"Says who?" Billie was pointing the crooked stick at Jacky's chest. "If I am a black wizard, soon to be a master wizard, you can't kill me with just a sword."

Jacky considered a moment, working her fingers in the grass as she lay on ground. She considered whether to allow Billie this play victory, but she also considered whether she could reach her own "sword" and fight back to her feet. Instead, she compromised. "I forgot we were fighting in the Boneyard. It's the center of your power."

Billie drew her lips up into a sneer. "That's right." They both knew The Boneyard well. They had been playing here for years, around the white sculptures their father collected.

They were natural and unnatural. Nature had not sculpted them alone but neither had a man. The Boneyard was full of twisted white ceramic pieces created when China was testing nuclear weapons in a remote corner of Siberia. The heat fused the sand together, leaving still life glimpses of glass chaos.

Jacky's heart caught as she thought one of them was looking at her. The "head" was nothing more than a roundish end with some bubbles in it. More like a finger than a face.

Billie turned around to look at it too. "Do you think they're radioactive?"

"Not unless you eat it, dad said."

"You mean it's not dangerous unless you eat it. It's still radioactive."

"Yeah, right. Sometimes I think a piece is looking at me."

Billie smiled. "Yeah, isn't it cool! I bet no other kid on the planet has a back yard like this."

"Sure." She thought she saw one of the eye-like bubbles on the tip of the sculpture wink at her. Surely, it was just a trick of the light.

No comments: